


Tobogganing

by Losyark



Series: Tobogganing [1]
Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: AU, Gen, John is dead, ghost - Freeform, only not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-27
Updated: 2008-01-27
Packaged: 2018-01-12 03:43:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1181478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Losyark/pseuds/Losyark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Johnny Sheppard was ten years old, he begged his father for a toboggan for Christmas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 When Johnny Sheppard was six years old, he begged his father for a toboggan for Christmas. He got an algebra set.

 

 

When Johnny Sheppard was seven years old, he begged his father for a toboggan for Christmas.  He got a chemistry set.

 

When Johnny Sheppard was eight years old, he begged his father for a toboggan for Christmas. He got a cricket set.

 

When Johnny Sheppard was nine years old, he begged his father for a toboggan for Christmas. He got a set of new leather shoes.

 

When Johnny Sheppard was ten years old, he begged his father for a toboggan for Christmas. 

 

He got a toboggan.

 

Johnny's eyes bugged out of his head. Mr. Sheppard frowned. "I say, Mother. Didn't we agree to a new--"

 

"Toboggan, yes, yes, dear, we did, a _new_ one," she said, elbowing her husband surreptitiously. "I couldn't find a new one, but you know, Doctor McKay is such a clever engineer that he didn't mind refitting his son's."

 

"Ahem. Yes," Mr. Sheppard said and went to call down the maid to bring in the morning tea.

 

Johnny couldn't care less if his bright new, sky blue toboggan used to be the snobby McKay kid's.

 

It was a _toboggan_.

 

Johnny kissed Mother on the cheek and shook Father's hand dutifully. He ran into the foyer to put on his long pants and his boots and scarf and the new mittens and woolly hat that nanny had knit for him.

 

"Don't you want your tea first, Johnny?" his mother called, voice wafting like tinkling bells from the drawing room where the Christmas Tree was set up.

 

"No, no, thank you Mother!" Johnny said and wrapped his scarf up over his nose and vanished into the snow.

 

***

 

Johnny's head hurt. His chest hurt. His throat hurt.

 

But today, oh, today had been _glorious_.

 

Heaven, Johnny was sure, was not going to be filled with fluffy clouds and strumming angels, like Father O'Miley preached about every Sunday. Heaven was going to be filled with mounds and mounds of puffy white snow and the joyful shrieks of tobogganers speeding down the hills faster than any race horse could go.

 

Johnny knew he had stayed out too late, but he'd been having so much fun; too much fun to bother about socks that were soaked through and the biting wind and the setting sun.

 

He pretended he didn't hear Mother calling him in for dinner until it was well and truly dark, then trudged back up the hill at the back of the grounds and towards the house.   In the distance, he could see the warm glow of the gas lamps through the windows of McKay Manor and wondered if Mother would make him write a thank-you card to Doctor McKay. 

 

Johnny wouldn't mind thanking the Doctor. The sky blue paint was fantastic and the runners of the toboggan had been waxed to powder-skimming perfection. But the thought of saying anything nice to a McKay sort of made him twisty inside. Ever since the day Meredith had been moved up a level in school because of his arithmetic skills, Johnny had sort of ever-so-secretly despised the gloating snob.

 

Johnny was _just_ as good at maths as Meredith (well, almost) but Johnny preferred to spend his time playing cricket or conkers or running races with the other boys out back of the little one-room school over staying inside and carefully redoing the equations on his slate. It didn't make him _stupider_ , like Meredith said it did.  Besides, 'stupider' was not a proper word, Father said so.

 

The first sneeze startled Johnny and his nanny both on the doorstep to the house, and by the time he was finished the soup course his nose was red and throbbing from blowing it too much, and his face felt too hot.

 

Mother pressed a cool, dry hand against his forehead and sent him up to bed with nanny and a cold compress. Nanny made noises about calling a doctor, and Johnny's vision started to swim. Laying down made the world tilt a little bit less, but the dark was too cold. Johnny shivered and tried to burrow down into his blankets and his dratted nanny kept trying to pack ice around his arms.

 

"G'way," Johnny muttered.  "Sl'pin," and coughed, and coughed, and coughed.

 

Eventually he tumbled into a deep, fitful sleep and dreamt of tobogganing on puffed clouds in the sky.

 

Johnny, of course, was wrong. There was no tobogganing in Heaven.

 

For Johnny, there was no Heaven at all.

 

He just slept, and slept, and slept, and never woke up.

 

The only thing that kept him from dropping straight down in the warm darkness of Forever was the vague thought that he still owed Doctor McKay a thank you note.

 

***

 

Johnny drifted. Sometimes he thought he was awake, but when he sat up the room was cold and dark and empty, all the furniture except for his bed covered in cobwebs, or rotting away, or vanished, so he knew he must be asleep. He lay back down and decided that next time he opened his eyes, he really would be awake, but when he sat up again there was an even thicker layer of dust on the floorboards, and even greyer film of grime on the windows.

 

Eventually Johnny stopped waking himself up at all.

 

Instead he thought a lot about Mother and Father and the smell of tea in the breakfast room mingling with the sharp scent of pine and cinnamon that was, to Johnny, the exact potpourri of Christmas.

 

Sometimes he thought he heard voices in the dark. First it was Mother weeping, Father begging, nanny saying goodbye. There was a whole day where Johnny swore he heard hymns and Father O'Miley's tediously long sermons, and then something like a shovel in dirt. After that there was a lot of silence, for a long long time.

 

The silence was peaceful and Johnny just lay in bed and enjoyed being able to sleep in. Soon it would be morning and he would have to go to school and that hideous Meredith McKay would be smirking at him from the front of the class room, all sharp nose and gold springy curls.

 

McKay... something about a McKay. Johnny knew he had to remember ... remember _something_. But Johnny never remembered what he remembered he had to remember in a dream, so he let the thought slide away, threading off into the darkness for a while, until it would come skimming back up, like a water spider on the surface of the pond out the back of the school house.

 

Then the voices came back – sometimes distant, floors below in the echoing grand foyer, or sometimes right beside his bed. None of them were voices Johnny knew so he stayed very still and hoped that the strangers wouldn't notice him and would go away soon. They always did.

 

Until.

 

There was a loud, harsh noise outside of the house, on the drive, that Johnny didn't recognize at all. It sounded like a big animal growling, but Johnny had never heard of bears getting big enough to make _that_ kind of sound. There was some yelling and some grunting and for a while the bang of heavy things being set down on the wooden floor in a way that was sure to scratch the finish and make Father furious.

 

Then there was quiet again.

 

Johnny relaxed and was ready to slip back down into a deeper sleep when footsteps pounded up the stairway and into his bedroom and a sharp, grating voice said: "This place is _filthy!_ "

 

The man, whose voice Johnny sort of knew but didn't, made an annoyed sound. Johnny thought was very unfair of him to say that his room was filthy, as nanny always kept Johnny's room very tidy. There was a rustle and an unfamiliar snapping sound, and then some beeping the likes of which Johnny had never heard before.

 

Curious about this new dream, Johnny cracked one small eyelid.

 

He could see only the vague darkish outline of a broad shouldered man with close cropped hair. The light pouring in from downstairs – much brighter than Johnny had ever seen gas lamps burn before – haloed around the man's head and shadowed his face. The man was holding something against his head and talking into the air.

 

"Yes," he said. Then, "Yes," again. Then, "Yes! Yes! I know that! Why do you think I...? What? I _hired you to clean the_ – well, yes of _course_ I meant upstairs too! Where on Earth am I suppose to sleep if you-- ... The master is going to be my _lab_ , you idiot! I... you!  _Fine_. The second half of your payment will _not_ be coming and I will personally make sure that you never get another client again! You... what? ... a little late for apologies now! You do _not screw a McKay_."

 

  
_McKay_.

 

Something about a... about a McKay... that Johnny was supposed to remember.

 

The man snapped his strange black thing closed and shoved it into his trouser pockets and put his hands on his hips.

 

"Fuck," the man said.

 

Johnny opened his other eye in shock. Johnny knew that word, of course, but he'd never heard anyone but a dock worker use it. Johnny decided he liked this strange man very much.

 

The man turned around and stomped back downstairs. Curious, knowing with the sure logic of dreamers that he would not get in trouble if he was caught out of bed, Johnny slid his chilled toes out from under his covers and tiptoed across the floor and down the steps after him.

 

The man was dressed strangely, as far as Johnny could tell by leaning over the banister and watching the top of his thinning hair move towards Johnny's parent's room. The man's clothing was too loose, hanging off his shoulders, cinched in at the waist but baggy everywhere else. His trousers had no shape at all, and his blazer didn't even cover his derrière. It was nearly indecent.

 

Johnny was thrilled.

 

He followed the man downstairs, treading very quietly and stepping over all the floorboards that he knew squeaked. The man pushed open the door to the master bedroom and Johnny hesitated. No one but his parents and the maid were allowed in the master bedroom; Johnny had only ever been in it once that he could remember, and that was when Mother was very ill with a cough and Johnny had snuck in to see her.

 

Father had whipped him with a switch for disobeying the doctor's order to keep Mother isolated, but in the end Johnny had not taken sick as well and Mother had recovered.

 

Now Johnny stuck his head cautiously around the frame.

 

His jaw dropped in dismay.

 

Gone!

 

Mother's heirloom wardrobe, the large four poster bed he remembered so well, the beautiful drapes and the patterned rug, the hope chest; all of it was _gone_. The floors shone with new polish, the walls gleamed a fresh whitewash instead of the rich burgundy wallpaper, and all around the perimeter of the room there were shiny metal tables with tubes and glasses, chalk boards and metal boxes with glass faces and chairs on wheels.

 

"Where's my parent's room?" Johnny demanded.

 

The man stopped in the middle of the master. He turned around slowly and faced Johnny. He set down his suitcase, blinked a few times, then shook his head and rubbed his arms. "Odd," he said.

 

"Where's my parent's room?" Johnny asked louder, stepping around the door frame and standing up straight.

 

The man blinked again, then completely ignored Johnny – the _nerve!_  Johnny may only be ten years old, but he was the heir to the Sheppard name and fortune! – and bent to retrieve his suitcase.

 

He stowed it up against a wall and proceeded to dig around in a brown paper box for blankets and pillows, muttering all the while about the poor condition of his back and what sleeping on a metal table would do to it, and how he was an idiot for not getting the delivery of the sofas moved to a day earlier.

 

"I said!" Johnny screamed, walking straight up behind the man, "Where is my _parent's room!_ "

 

The man ignored Johnny again, and it made Johnny so furious that he reached out and punched the man in the top of his thigh.

 

Or at least, Johnny tried to.

 

His hand passed right through the man, then right through the table too.

 

Johnny half expected his hand to go right through the floor as well, but the wooden boards stopped him. Johnny let the momentum carry him all the way down to his knees and stayed there, staring at his hands.

 

They looked solid and real to him.

 

"Oh," Johnny whispered. "Oh, oh, no. No, no."

 

And then, even though he hated it, but because Johnny was still just a little boy, a little boy without a Mother at all, he realized, a little boy who was completely alone and completely terrified, Johnny began to cry.

 

***

 

Eventually, Johnny ran out of tears. It hurt too much to cry any more. He curled into a ball on the clean bare floor and wrapped his arms around his knees and shivered with cold and, yes, he wasn't too proud to admit, terror.

 

By the time Johnny pulled his weary, aching head up to look at the man, the man was sleeping fitfully on one of the long metal tables in a sack of slick shiny cloth. Johnny pulled himself up, head throbbing and throat burning and his eyes itchy and dry, and scrubbed at the tear tracks on his cheeks. He stumbled over to look at the man.

 

Now that Johnny wasn't making any noise, the man seemed to be sleeping a bit better, sighing and relaxing back into his flat pillow. He had a sharpish nose, a wide slanting mouth, and a slowly retreating hairline. He looked familiar, but Johnny couldn't quite place him. 

 

Hand shaking, heart beating against the back of his tongue, Johnny reached up and touched the man's pillowy cheek. Johnny's small fingers, still slightly chubby with youth, passed right through. Where they came in contact with the man's flesh they tingled, hot pins and needles shooting up Johnny's arm. He wrenched his hand back and stared at it. He poked his fingers with his other hand – still solid, but hot, so hot.

 

Johnny clamped his hands together. He suddenly realized that he was _freezing_.

 

Johnny wanted his nanny. When Johnny was cold, nanny would make him a cup of chocolate and bundle him up in a down blanket and plonk him down on the setee by the fireplace in the library and read him Grimm's fairy tales. She did the best voices.  Johnny especially liked the parts where the people cut up the monsters and wolves.

 

Treading carefully, Johnny walked out of the master bedroom and into the main hall. All the furniture was gone – the wallpaper was the same in the hallways, dark green and gold stripes, but the runner in the middle of the floor had been torn out and replaced with more of the same shiny black wood. There were dusty outlines against the walls where the hall tables and vase pedestals used to stand, and so many brown paper boxes and trunks that Johnny nearly couldn't navigate around the corner.

 

The door to the library was thrown wide, and Johnny moaned with relief to see that absolutely nothing had changed in that room at all. He ran into centre of the room, scrambled over the back of the settee, and dropped down on the marble ledge beside the grate, anticipating the warm radiating out of the hearth.

 

None came. The marble mantle was stone-cold.

 

Shivering, tears burning again in the back of his eyes, Johnny started in utter disbelief at the black, scrubbed grate.  There were no ashes, no cinders, no fire, _nothing_.

 

More than anything else, the lack of fire terrified Johnny. 

 

Father _always_ had a fire burning in the library grate.

 

_Always._

 

Curling in on himself again, Johnny let loose a long, scared wail.

 

  
_Gone_.

 

His family was gone. Left!

 

They had moved out and left Johnny behind!

 

Alone.

 

Alone with a strange man who was not really there, who could not hear or see Johnny, who talked to himself.

 

A man who was...

 

Johnny gasped as the realization struck.

 

The man was a _ghost_.

 

That was the only explanation. Johnny's hand passed right through him, and the man didn't seem to be able to hear Johnny. He must be a ghost. A ghost or an angel or a demon or some spirit.

 

Maybe the man had driven Johnny's family out, scared them away. Scared them so badly that they had forgotten to fetch Johnny. Or maybe the man – yes, that was it! – the ghost man was holding Johnny ransom! Johnny had been _kidnapped by a ghost_.

 

The grate next to Johnny suddenly sparked and a fireball appeared. Johnny shrieked and leapt away from the mantle, crashing painlessly through the settee and rolling head over heels out the other side.

 

The ghost man was standing in the door way, a magic wand clutched in one hand, a mug of something pungent and bitter smelling in the other, and the slim black thing squeezed between his shoulder and ear.

 

"Awful!" the man said into the air, and Johnny cringed and curled his hands over his head, wincing at the sheer annoyance in the man's grating voice. "This place is a tomb – it's drafty and cold and -- well, yes, yes, of course I _knew_... well the contractors putting in the spray insulation better show up at the asscrack of dawn tomorrow or I _will_ start breaking heads. At least I have the remote gas fireplace set up... Well I'm not _completely_ stupid."

 

The ghost man walked past Johnny, unconsciously giving the boy wide berth, and plopped down on the settee. He propped socked feet up on the marble ledge where Johnny had been sitting ( _no slippers!_ Johnny thought, horrified, before he realized that he wasn't wearing any either) and took a long slurp from his mug.

 

The man tossed his magic fire-making wand down against the arm rest and Johnny crept closer and peered at it, crouched on the other side of the settee. It didn't look like any sort of magic wand Johnny had ever read about before – it was cream coloured and rectangular and covered with little grey buttons labelled things like 'on' and 'high' and 'automatic timer'.

 

"—killing me," the man said and Johnny snapped his attention back up to him. 

 

  
_Killing?_ Johnny thought, cold terror dropping like a lump of ice into his gut.

 

"Absolutely killing me. I cannot _wait_ for the cleaning service to set up my bedroom. Ah, my lovely, wonderful, precious prescription mattress. What do you mean, clean it myself? Carson, I am a world famous _scientist_. I rewrite the laws of physics on a daily basis. I am _too busy_ to clean my house! That's _why_ I hired a cleaner."

 

Johnny slunk around the side of the settee to look up at the ghost-wizard-man's face. He was slurping from his mug and talking, no, not into the air but into the slim black thing that he was pressing against his head.

 

Johnny wondered if this Carson person had been trapped inside it, like Johnny had be trapped inside his house. The ghost man was still ignoring Johnny, but Johnny knew that the man had to know that he was there – he had walked _around_ Johnny.

 

Miserable, Johnny slumped back against the marble mantle place, grateful at least for the warmth that the magical fire provided against his back.

 

Johnny's arm accidentally brushed the man's leg and the man jumped and shivered. Johnny curled in on himself and bit his bottom lip and waited to be yelled at. Instead the man set down his mug on the floor and sat up and waved a hand at Johnny. Johnny was too startled to move in time and the man's hand passed right through his head.

 

Johnny felt suddenly sick.

 

"Huh," the man said, sitting back again, staring at his fingers. "There's another one. One of those odd cold patches. Yeah, the whole damned place is filled with these little pockets of cold air. And a breeze – I swear I heard wailing this morning, Carson. And like, crying or something last night... what? Oh, don't be ridiculous. I don't _have_ an imagination to get carried away by in the first place. Only I... well, yes, I guess some company would be ... yeah, okay, say... a month from Saturday, after I've got the movers to set up the spare bedroom? And, God, hot running water. Yeah, okay. Bye."

 

The man snapped the black thing closed and shoved it in his baggy trouser pockets and retrieved his mug of black liquid – coffee, Johnny realized – and sat glaring at the fire for the rest of the morning. There was a knot between his eyebrows that told Johnny that he was thinking and thinking so hard that it was best that he was left alone. 

Johnny's Father used to get knots like that sitting in that very same place on his face, while in that very seat, and it made something in Johnny's chest hurt.

 

At noon, the clock on the top of the mantel chimed and the man's stomach grumbled and he got up and went to the kitchen, leaving Johnny and the magic fire behind.

 

Realizing belatedly that he probably should be hungry by now, too, Johnny trudged after his captor. When he got to the kitchen, he found the man fighting with the old wood burning stove, blowing ineffectually at the smoking kindling and muttering things like "swear to God, renovating the whole kitchen, stainless steel, electric stove, the _works_ ," and utterly failing to start the fire.

 

"Let me," Johnny said, because even if this ghost wizard man had driven away Johnny's family, Johnny still wanted a warm breakfast, and the only way he was going to get that was to help.

 

Johnny slid in under the man's arm, being careful not to touch him again because that was mostly unpleasant, and reached into the stove to rearrange the wood when the man looked away to find more matches. Johnny blew gently, the right way, when the man touched a freshly sparking match to the crumpled newspaper under the wood chips. The fire wavered and caught, and the man pulled himself up, crowing triumphantly.

 

"Well, you didn't do all of it yourself!" Johnny snapped, but as usual the man ignored him. Johnny was starting to wonder if it was worth talking to his captor at all. "Besides, if you're so fantastic, why didn't you just light it with your magic wand, huh?"

 

The man was too busy pulling frying pans out of the brown boxes and eggs, milk, and butter out of the pantry to answer. He cracked three into the pan, set it on the wood stove, then hesitated. Contrite, Johnny inched closer and folded his hands and asked, in a small soft voice, "May I have one too, please?"

 

The man cracked a fourth egg into the pan, scratched his head at himself, and went to dispose of the shells. He came back to the pan with another mug of the coffee – it came out of a burbling contraption on the counter the likes of which Johnny had never seen before in his life – and a wooden spoon to scramble up the eggs.

 

He said nothing to Johnny, so Johnny said nothing back, taking the time to study the compact, sleek device that made the coffee. He wished he could try some – the man seemed to be enjoying it immensely. Johnny's hands passed through the machine and the counter.

 

Hm – but it _hadn't_ passed through the wood inside the stove.

 

Experimenting, Johnny concentrated really really hard on touching the juice glass the man had left sitting beside the coffee making device. The first time Johnny's hand passed through it. The second time, he made it wobble. The third time, Johnny managed to knock it right off the counter.

 

Eye wide with too-late realization, Johnny watched the glass fall through the air. He reached out to try to catch it, failed, and jumped backwards as the shards of glass sprayed out across the kitchen floor. They passed through him, of course.

 

The man jumped at the sound, and whirled around brandishing the wooden spoon like a sword. Johnny ducked his head and covered it with his arms again and yelped, "Sorry, sorry!"

 

"Oh, for fuck's sake!" the man snarled. He put his mug down on the table and left the room. Johnny stared at the mug, then tiptoed over. He stuck his face over the rim and inhaled. It smelled great. But his lips passed through when he tried to slurp, leaving only a vague sensation of warmth.

 

Johnny sidled over to the stove to suck up the fire's warmth instead, and keep an eye on the eggs. Right before they were going to start smoking, the man came back into the room wearing strange dirty white shoes and brandishing a cobwebby broom and a dust pan. He started to sweep up the broken glass, and Johnny said, careful to keep his tone neutral to avoid even more trouble, "The eggs are burning."

 

The man turned around distractedly, said "Hm?", and then dropped the broom and dust pan – spraying the glass everywhere again – and leapt at the frying pan, which had started to billow black smoke.

 

He grabbed the pan off the stove without a towel wrapped around the black handle, which Johnny supposed must have hurt, and dropped it onto the butcher block in the middle of the room.

 

"Well, _fuck_ ," the man said again, abandoning the eggs to cool while he finished cleaning up the glass. Scared by his anger, Johnny shrunk into the corner and stayed there until all the glass was tossed into a metal trash bin and the man had dished out most of the eggs onto his own plate. 

 

He left the burnt ones in the pan, for Johnny, the boy supposed, and moved into the formal dining room to eat. Johnny stared into the pan, at the black eggs, and sighed. He wasn't all that hungry anyway.

 

Or hungry at all. Even the smell of the cooking eggs wasn't stirring his appetite.

 

Johnny followed the man to the dining room, taken aback for a moment by the man's absolute lack of table manners of any sort. Johnny's Father's dining set was still there, a heavy mahogany table with ten matching chairs, but the seats had been reupholstered to match the new dark blue wallpaper.

 

Beyond the dining room table was the wide bay window, the top half of the panes frosted amber, yellow and green stained glass. The warm tones filtered the harsh sunlight, dappling the ghost man's face with summer light. 

 

Something inside Johnny snapped.

 

Johnny let his feet carry him over the window.

 

It wasn't winter.

 

When Johnny had gone to bed, the world had been sleeping beneath a diamond-sparkle blanket of crisp Christmas snow. It now was early summer, the trees emerald with new leaves, the drive at the front of the house overgrown with gutter weeds and wild flowers.

 

Before he realized it was him making the sound, Johnny heard scared, pathetic whimpering. Behind him there was a clink. Johnny spun around – the man was staring _right at him_. His mouth hung open and his fork lay haphazardly against the edge of his plate, where he'd evidently dropped it.

 

"It's not winter," Johnny said.

 

The man jerked and blinked as if someone had slapped him on the face. He rose slowly from his seat and walked towards Johnny, hands outstretched. Johnny stayed perfectly still, and the man's hand passed through his shoulder and touched the window pane behind.  The man hissed at the cold, snatched his hand back and rubbed his fingers.

 

"What happened?" Johnny asked.

 

The man jerked back another step, gulping, and for a quivering second, stood still and thrust his chin up defiantly. "There's..." he began. "There's no such thing as..." Then his resolve crumbled and he fled the house, shooting down the hallway and out the wide foyer doors, banging them back.

 

Johnny followed his progress across the driveway from the dining room window. The man stopped in front of a battered carriage with no horse hook ups and sat on its hood. He whipped out his talking device again.

 

"Carson!" he screamed into it. "I ... I saw... I think my new house is haunted!"

 

Johnny blinked. 

 

But. But no. The _man_ was the ghost.

 

Not Johnny.

 

"I was in the dining room – there was... there's that strange stained glass that I hate, you know, the one I want to knock out, and it the ... there was a _shadow_. No, no, not a body, per say, but you know, sort of the _outline_ where the sunlight stopped, like _shafts_ through a cloud only no clouds and _inside my house!_ "

 

Johnny looked down at his arms and legs. The sunlight was indeed shafting around him, but ... couldn't the man _see_ Johnny?

 

"I don't know, I don't know!" the man shrieked. "It's not like I can call the Ghostbusters! I am not being _ridiculous!_ Carson, I _saw_ it. I _touched it_ and the whole area was cold."

 

Only now did the man look back up at the window. When he did his jaw dropped, and so did his talking device. It fell out of his hand and crunched on the gravel. Johnny could hear a faintly tinny "hello? Rodney? Hello?" echoing up out of it in a Scottish brogue.

 

Johnny waved slowly at the man in the drive way.

 

The man turned completely white and waved back.


	2. Chapter 2

Johnny pressed himself into a corner when the man came back into the room.

 

"Hi," the man said, hesitating in the doorway, worrying the cuffs of his sweater. "I... uh... I'm, um, Rodney McKay. And I... uh... own this house now."

 

Johnny straightened slightly. 

 

McKay.

 

From McKay Manor?

 

Something itched in the back of his head, something he was supposed to remember but... no, it was gone, a gossamer thread sinking back into the darkness of mostly forgotten and awfully long dreams.

 

"Can you... can you hear me?" Rodney McKay asked.

 

Johnny nodded, then remembered that Rodney McKay had told the Carson-device that he couldn't see Johnny. He said "yes." Rodney McKay didn't react as if he'd heard Johnny, so Johnny walked over to the table and concentrated very very hard and lifted up the fork.

 

Rodney McKay swallowed heavily, looked like he was going to be sick, and said, "I guess you can. Who are you?"

 

Johnny dropped the fork with an annoyed clatter. If Johnny couldn't speak, how was he supposed to tell the man who he was? That he was Johnny Sheppard and that he had gone tobogganing and gotten sick and fallen asleep and woken up and Rodney McKay was there and that he wanted his Mother because... because...

 

Johnny was dead.

 

Johnny was the ghost.

 

Another hitching sob escaped before Johnny could clamp down on it. Rodney McKay jumped and red splotches appeared on his cheeks and he said, "Oh, no, no that I can hear. No, no kid, don't... don't cry... I'm not... I'm no good with crying kids, especially invisible dead kids. Please, please."

 

Johnny, insulted at being called a kid, squeezed down on his tears and sniffled instead. Rodney McKay seemed to relax a bit, letting out a breath of air. His shoulders slumped.

 

"Listen, kid," Rodney McKay said. "I don't ... I don't want to hurt you, okay? And I... I don't want you to hurt me either. So let's just... can't you just go away?"

 

Johnny stared at the open door behind Rodney McKay. That was a good question. Why couldn't Johnny just go? Wasn't he supposed to be in Heaven or Hell or something already? Unless this was Hell. 

 

Johnny didn't like that thought so he stopped thinking it.

 

Instead he brushed past Rodney McKay and walked down the cluttered hallway to the still-open foyer doors. He walked straight towards the beaming sunlight, feeling the warmth of the shine on his face. When he got to the doors he hesitated, then stepped out on to the front porch. He lifted his hands and his head, and waited to fly up to Heaven or for angels to come down and fetch him or, or something.

 

Nothing happened.

 

Frustrated, Johnny tried to take a step down off the porch and found that he couldn't. For all that the air was completely empty and clear, if felt as if there was a brick wall between Johnny and the rest of the world.

 

Johnny was a ghost and he could not leave the house in which he'd died.

 

Scared and angry and missing his Mother terribly, Johnny ran back into the dining room, where Rodney McKay was still staring at the corner Johnny had been in, and threw the fork at the wall so hard that the tines stuck into the plaster.

 

Rodney McKay yelped and then scowled. "Hey!" he snapped, "there's no need to wreck the joint! I just spent half of my savings getting this dump renovated."

 

"It was fine before!" Johnny shouted. In his fury he managed to upend the half-eaten plate of cold, congealing eggs, splattering them across the wall beside Rodney McKay. "It was fine the way my Father made it!"

 

"Okay, okay, I'm sorry!" Rodney said, palms held outwards in a gesture of peace. "It's not a dump. I'm sorry. Please stop playing poltergeist, kid."

 

Johnny, panting and red faced with anger and exertion, felt the tears prickling the back of his eyes again and refused to let them fall. He scrubbed at his face and moved back to the window to glare out at the world, the whole wide world, that he would never, ever get to see.

 

"Oh," Rodney McKay said softly. "There you are."

 

Johnny turned around to look at Rodney McKay. He was halfway across the dining room now, clutching the back of a chair with white knuckled-hands, keeping the furniture between them like a ward.

 

"I'm sorry I insulted your house," Rodney McKay said warily.

 

Johnny hung his head.

 

"Did you used to live here?"

 

Johnny, despondent and sullen, nodded.

 

"Oh, hey, I saw that!" Rodney McKayexclaimed. He stepped around the chair in his excitement, fear forgotten. He walked right up to Johnny and stopped in front of him. "I can see it in the refraction of light when you nod or shake your head. What the hell is this glass made out of?" 

 

Rodney McKay tapped it gently – it made the strange low resonating chime that Johnny associated with the bay windows. Father had had the windows made specially somewhere in the Mediterranean and shipped overseas for the house. It was called Atlantian Glass; the makers claimed to be the direct descendants of the last of the people of Atlantis. Father hadn't believed them for one second, but the glass was pretty, and it gave John a thrill to think that their bay windows were made with magic.

 

Johnny looked up at Rodney McKay, who still seemed to be contemplating the vaguely yellowish glass. Rodney McKay caught the movement of the sunbeams. Maybe he sensed Johnny's impatience, too.

 

"How long have you been here?" Rodney McKay asked.

 

Johnny shrugged.

 

"Oh," Rodney McKay said. "Maybe you don't know. Oooor you can't answer that with a yes or no. Hm, yes or no, yes or no. Oh! Uh... are you the only one here?"

 

Miserable, Johnny nodded. Then he shook his head.

 

Rodney McKay huffed in exasperation. "Well, is it yes or no?"

 

Johnny pointed at Rodney McKay.

 

"Oh," the man said. "You mean, you and me? Just you and me?"

 

Johnny nodded.

 

"Well that's a relief," Rodney McKay said, and he actually did sound so relieved that Johnny wanted to hit him.

 

Johnny's family was gone. How dare Rodney McKay be happy about that! Johnny stomped away, tossed the chair to the floor for good measure, and went back up his bedroom to sulk.

 

For a long time Rodney McKay just puttered around downstairs. Johnny could hear bangs and cusses and the sounds of more glass breaking, then a grinding from the master bedroom followed by Rodney McKay's footsteps coming up the landing.

 

When the man reached the doorway, he stopped. 

 

"Hi. There you are," Rodney McKay said. Johnny looked up – Rodney McKay was wearing a pair of ridiculous spectacles. The lenses were the wrong shape for the frames, and were made up of the familiar amber glass from the downstairs window. "I thought you may be up here."

 

Rodney McKay had broken his Father's priceless window!

 

Furious, Johnny got up and screamed at Rodney to "Get out! Get out of my house!"

 

Rodney McKay took a jerky step backwards, palms out, and said, "whoa, calm down, kid! I can't hear you – and I’m not good a reading lips."

 

Johnny scowled and pointed with a shaking finger at the glasses. 

 

Rodney McKay, who had called himself intelligent when he was talking with the Carson Device, seemed to catch on fast enough.

 

"You're mad I broke the window."

 

Johnny nodded jerkily.

 

"It was either that or walk around the house talking to myself," Rodney McKay defended. "Or holding a large sheet of glass up in front of my face at all times. This glass has very unique properties, and as soon as I look into the provenance of the panes I'll--"

 

"You already do talk to yourself a lot!" Johnny snapped back, interrupting with far more sass than his Father would have ever tolerated.

 

Rodney McKay shook his head. "I still can't hear you, kid. Don't worry, I'm a genius, I'll rig up something. The first communications device that allows the dead to speak! Oh, I'll get a Nobel for sure for that!"

 

Johnny stood there and watched the man daydream a little. His face was so momentarily blissful that Johnny couldn't help but think about the last time he'd been that happy. That was when... when he had...

 

Remembering suddenly, Johnny dropped to his knees and peered under his bed with so much longing that it actually hurt him.

 

"Hey, kid, where did you... oh, there you are," Rodney McKay said. He shuffled forward and asked, "What are you looking at?"

 

Rodney McKay reached under the bed and pulled out the sky blue toboggan. It was solidly built, and had survived the years stowed in the musty darkness, but the lovely blue paint was peeling and the blades were moulding from being put away wet.

 

Forlornly, Johnny clambered into the toboggan and wrapped his hands around the side handles, and closed his eyes and imagined that he was racing down the hill, chilly wind in his face, socks soaked through.

 

"This yours?" Rodney McKay asked.

 

Johnny nodded.

 

"Property of Johnathan Sheppard," Rodney McKay read off the side of the blade. He looked up. "Are you Johnathan Sheppard?"

 

Johnny nodded again.

 

"Dr. M.W. McKay," Rodney McKay read next. "Manufactured by... oh, hey. That's my... my god, that was my... my great grandfather. He made your toboggan?"

 

Johnny nodded.

 

"That's so cool," Rodney McKay breathed, running long fingers over the elegantly painted script. "Looks like we were meant to be friends, Johnathan," Rodney McKay said softly.

 

Johnny looked up. "Friends?" he asked.

 

"That word I understood," Rodney McKay said gently. "Yeah, Friends. I mean, legally speaking, this is probably still your house, even though I just bought it and it's also legally mine. Why not? You're not really a real kid. I mean, me, and children? Awful - just, like water and oil. I'm always afraid I'll break them, but, uh, I can't break you, so... You don't make noise, you won't eat my chips or drink my beer, and I'm sure you won't leave your dirty socks all across the living room. It’s not like you'll be the worst roommate I've ever had to live with."

 

Johnny felt his mouth split into a smile for the first time since Christmas Morning.

 

***

 

Rodney McKay was fascinating. 

 

Every day with him was a learning experience for Johnny – John, Rodney called him when he'd invited Johnny to use his own given name, and Johnny rather liked the maturity of the new diminutive. Rodney was proficient in maths the likes of which John had never seen before. He spent hours staring at the 'white boards' in the lab his parent's master bedroom had become, trying to cipher the complicated equations.

 

This was way harder than the stuff Meredith McKay used to get for his advanced homework.

 

People came in and out of the house, tearing out walls to spray in a grey foam that Rodney promised would make the drafty rooms more airtight and 'energy efficient', then putting the walls back in. They brought in furniture and ripped apart the old kitchen and put in a new sparkling one. The changes didn't distress John too much, because Rodney was right there to explain why they had to be done – more cost effective, more convenient, and John's new favourite word: cooler. When the cleaning service headed up the stairs to John's room, he let forth a wail, the only sound that Rodney seemed to be able to hear, and tried to shove the maid back out.

 

"No, no, no!" he cried. "This is my room, you can't! I won't let you change my room!"

 

"John, John, relax," Rodney said, shutting the door in the puzzled maid's face and turning back to face the boy. "Listen, I know I was going to tear this room apart and make it mine, but I won't, I promise. This is your room. No one will touch it. She'll just clean it if you want – so you can see out of the window, maybe? Because even though you're already dead, I'm sure the filth in here will give you some sort of horrible disease or--"

 

John put up a surrendering hand.

 

"Good," Rodney said with a firm nod and let the maid in.

 

Rodney already had the reputation of being an eccentric intellectual, so talking to the air was not a huge step in his oddness. The workers generally ignored the one-sided conversations he engaged in everywhere he was in the house. John thought it was funny and tried to get Rodney to say really, really strange things when people were within earshot.

 

The renovators refitted the guest bedroom into Rodney's master, and the nanny's room into a sumptuous bathroom with so much marble John feared it would fall through the floor. The downstairs maids rooms were made into another bathroom and a guest room, and the lab became more and more like something out of a science fiction penny novel story every day.

 

John patiently sat with Rodney as he played with a keyboard that made things happen on the glass face of the silver boxes on the tables, and tried to figure out the maths, and talked into metal tubes and pipes when Rodney told him to.

 

All around them the house was slowly coming to life, clean and filled with electric lights the likes of which John's Father would never have been able to afford. It was becoming a home again. The insulation did make the house warmer, and the kitchen was bright and welcoming.

 

Rodney took out the Atlantis Glass and replaced it with a regular normal glass, and stowed the panes very very carefully in the back of the new pantry.

 

Rodney did not touch the Library, for which John was grateful, but did show him how to use the magic wand that turned on the electric fire. John had enough strength to push the 'on' and 'off' buttons himself whenever he got chilly or lonely. John was mostly lonely at night when Rodney slept, because John didn't like sleeping any more.

 

Over dinner, which Rodney usually ordered from places who sent over delivery in paper cartons and boxes and came from countries with cuisine the likes of which John had never seen before (and wished he could taste just once), Rodney would tell John all about his life.

 

Rodney had been born in Canada. McKay Manor had burned down after the stock market crash – which Rodney took an hour filled with ranting and amusing hand waving to explain – and the McKays had emigrated, leaving behind land that was technically the property of the McKay's, even if it had been left to go to seed. Rodney, who had just returned from a harrowing work assignment in Sibera (Sibera! John thought, I bet he's seen polar bears!) decided to purchase the house closest to his unoccupied family lands, quit the StarGate Command, and work on his own personal projects in blessed isolation instead, if the SGC wasn't going to appreciate his genius properly.

 

Rodney told John all about the StarGate Program. "You're not alive," Rodney pointed out, "so it's not like I'm breaking the non-disclosure rules."

 

John thought Rodney was putting him on – he encouraged the tales of aliens and space travel and glowing-eyed-gods with wide smiles and clapped hands and enthusiastic nodding, but he did not believe them for a second. Rodney, if nothing else, was an excellent story teller.

 

The first thing that Rodney ever heard John say, courtesy of the first working prototype of the McKay-Sheppard Living-Impaired Communications Relay, was "But if you loved Carter so much, why did she send you away?"

 

What followed was much hooting and shouting and going-right-through-arms high fives and then a serious discussion about how sometimes even though you may love someone very much, they might not always love you back. John absorbed it all seriously and Rodney told him to keep that in mind for when he grew up, and John didn't really have the heart to point out to Rodney that he didn't think he ever was going to grow up.

 

Even though he finally had his voice back, that was something John didn't say.

 

Almost one month since he had woken up had passed, and John had not grown an inch. Even his messy black hair had not gotten any longer. John thought he was probably going to be a ten year old boy ghost forever, which was kind of cool, okay, but... John thought maybe it would be nice to have grown up.

 

It was there in the lab, fine tuning the Relay prototype, that the man with the Scottish accent found Rodney and John one fine Saturday morning.

 

"Rodney?" a man in the door asked. "Who are you talkin' to?" He set down a small suitcase.

 

John recognized his voice immediately. "Oh!" he said into the Relay, enjoying the way his electronically amplified words echoed around the lab, "When did you let Carson out of the cellular telephone?"

 

"Have you gone daft, Rodney?" Carson said, pushing away the strange amber glasses that Rodney was trying to shove onto his nose. "If the SGC thought about bringing you back into the program, they sure as bloody hell won't if they catch you talking ta empty rooms!"

 

"It's not empty, Carson," Rodney insisted. "John is here."

 

John shifted, picking up first one foot and scratching his calf with it, and then the other.

 

Carson manhandled Rodney fairly effectively back down into his chair on wheels and pressed a hand against Rodney's forehead.

 

"I'm not sick, Carson! Put on the glasses. John, say something."

 

"Um," John said tentatively into the microphone. "Something?"

 

Rodney groaned and rolled his eyes. Carson froze.

 

"Where... is that wee voice coming from?" Carson asked.

 

Rodney proffered the glasses one more time. "Remember when I called you and told you I had a ghost?"

 

Carson frowned. "Aye. And do you remember that I told you that it was just this old house and your imagination and the stress of moving into a fixer-upper and ta stop drinking coffee after 4pm?"

 

Rodney said nothing and kept holding out the glasses. With a disgusted sigh, Carson finally snatched them out of Rodney's fingers and put them on his face.

 

"Aye, yes, the world is yellow Rodney. Now what?"

 

"Over here," John said into the mic. "Beside the window."

 

John knew the exact moment that Carson could see him. The man's face went totally white and his eyes bugged out. John waved. Carson waved back, so much a parody of Rodney's first reaction to seeing John that John couldn't help but grin.

 

"Hallo," Carson said faintly.

 

"Hello," John replied, remembering his manners. "I'm John Sheppard. I'm ten years old and, and I'm a ghost," he added for good measure, just to be clear.

 

"Aye, I can see that," Carson said, then out of the side of his mouth, "Rodney, why can I see that?"

 

Rodney crossed his arms and sat back and smiled smugly. "It's something to do with the glass – John says his father purchased it from Atlantians." Rodney gave the word a bit more emphasis than John thought was necessary.

 

Obviously the extra emphasis meant something to Carson for his eyes got wider and his mouth became a perfect 'o'. "You mean...?"

 

"Probably," Rodney admitted. "If you'll notice, the glass is almost the same colour and composition of a ZedPM."

 

"A Zed Pea What?" John asked. There was a really good secret going on here, and John wanted in on it.

 

"Nothing," both the living men said at exactly the same time, which told John that it wasn't nothing at all. Grown-ups only said 'nothing' when it was 'something.'

 

Besides that, John was feeling a little resentful towards this Carson person, barging into his house (okay, his and Rodney's house) and just... taking over as Rodney's friend. Rodney was John's friend.

 

"That's a mighty scowl for such a wee man," Carson said.

 

"I'm not wee!" John scowled harder and walked out of the room.

 

***

 

John retreated to his room. He wasn't sulking, he was just... looking out the window. On his toboggan. Which Rodney had moved onto the window bench so John could see out. Beyond the hill at the back of the house, the hill that John had only ever been able to toboggan on for one day, John could see the whole of the McKay farms, dappled with light green as the corn that belonged to the farmer who rented the land from Rodney started to poke it's head out of the soil. Past that there was a small pile of stones, half a corner and a bit of a wall, that had once been the home of Meredith McKay, the snobbiest kid in class, and Rodney's grandfather.

 

It still made John's head do funny hurty things when John tried to reconcile Meredith and Rodney in his head. Meredith married, with kids! John had bet that they all grew up snobs, too, but then Rodney was nice, so maybe whoever it was that Rodney's father had married had taught Rodney to not be a snob.

 

But Rodney was being a snob. He was being a snob about Atlantians and Zed Pea Thingies and a secret. Rodney never kept secrets from John. Never – he even told John about the SGC and that was the biggest secret of all. (Or it would be if it was real).

 

It was unfair. Carson suddenly shows up and now he's Rodney's best friend.

 

Well, that was fine with John, then. If Rodney wanted to tell secrets with stupid Carson and build his stupid Relay and win his stupid Nobel prize, that he could do it without John. John was going to leave.

 

John was going to leave!

 

John was going to...

 

John looked down at the toboggan under his feet. Rodney had repainted it sky blue, sanding off the curling flakes of old varnish first, adding a layer of something clear that would protect the colour.

 

John couldn't leave.

 

John couldn't actually go anywhere. He'd climbed all the way to the attic and all the way down to the cellar and he couldn't actually get out. The only place he could step out of doors was in the foyer, where he could stand on the porch. But he couldn't go beyond the stairs, beyond the perimeter of the house.

 

John was stuck here with stupid Carson and stupid Rodney and their stupid secrets.

 

***

 

John came back down stairs when he could smell the pizza.

 

Not that he could eat the pizza, but he enjoyed smelling it while he listened to Rodney's ridiculous stories about people who travel among the stars.

 

Carson and Rodney were seated on the floor of the library. John's favourite place beside the fire was empty and inviting, and both men now had goofy looking amber glasses.

 

Rodney was the first to notice John – he shivered once, the cold always heralding John's approach, and lifted his head to the doorway. "Hi, John," he said.

 

Carson dropped his pizza and whipped his head around.

 

John stood very still in the doorway and wished Carson would go away.

 

Instead the man said, "Aye, hallo again, John."

 

John cut his glance between the open pizza box and his favourite place to sit, and Carson.

 

"Oh, don't be a baby," Rodney snapped. "Come in, come in. Carson's sorry for calling you 'wee', aren’t you Carson?"

 

"What-?"

 

"There, see, he is. Come sit down John."

 

John reluctantly crossed the room. Purposefully, wanting to be showy and scary, he walked through the settee. He almost walked through Carson too, but swerved at the last minute, unnerved by the thought of passing all the way through a living person, and sat down on the marble ledge beside the mantel.

 

"I apologize," Carson said softly, picking up his ruined pizza off the hardwood floor and dumping it into the lid of the take away box, "for startling you and barging in this morning. Rodney told me he forgot ta tell you I'd been invited. I didn't mean ta startle you, and I don't want ta hurt your feelings. I'd verra much like for us ta be friends, John."

 

John frowned and folded his arms on his knees.

 

Carson swallowed nervously, licked his lips, and went on: "Rodney tells me you've been a verra good friend ta him this last month."

 

"Oh, I did not!" Rodney spluttered into his diet coke.

 

"Aye, well maybe not, but I can see how happy you are, Rodney," Carson admonished. "It's good for you to have a project of your own to involve yourself in, and someone here to keep you from overworking; someone else to spend time with."

 

Rodney looked down at his lap, his cheeks going slightly pink. "Yeah, well," Rodney said, "John's just a kid, right? I mean, I can't... just leave him by himself, you know, 'cause that would be just, just awful and lonely and ...awful."

 

John reached out and brushed one cool hand over Rodney's shoulder. Rodney looked up – John was smiling, small and a little sad, but a smile. John knew that Rodney was his best friend, and he appreciated Rodney. He also knew that Carspm was Rodney's friend. Okay, and maybe, John decided, Carson could be his friend too.

 

Maybe. But only if they let him in on the secrets.

 

John got up and walked out of the Library and down the hall and into the lab. Cranking the volume of the speakers all the way up he said, "All right, fine. Carson can be my friend, if he wants. But you have to tell me about Atlantis."

 

Then he came back into the room and found the men both staring at their own hands. John settled himself on the ledge and waited.

 

"Right," Rodney said. "So it's like this... you remember the Acended people, right?"

 

John nodded.

 

"Well, we actually think they're the ... the old Atlantians. That somehow they had a city called Atlantis and that city is what the Earth myth is about."

 

"But the SCG canna find it," Carson piped in.

 

"But we can find some of their technology. One of the things is a ZedPM, a crystal thingy that... makes energy."

 

Oh. Well, thought John, if that was the big secret, then he didn't get why it was so important to keep.

 

"What I can't figure out," Rodney admitted, "is why seeing through ZedPM glass lets me see ghosts."

 

Carson dropped his pizza again. John was starting to think that Carson was a messier eater than Rodney, and John hadn't considered that it was possible.

 

"Not a ghost," Carson said. "Ascended. John is partially ascended, Rodney! Like Anubis!"

 

"Holy crap," Rodney said, and dropped his pizza too.

 

***

 

Carson Beckett was a doctor, like Rodney, but he was a doctor of medicine. He did things like shine lights at John and measure the temperature of the room and asked John to push things around. John didn't mind the pushing things around, but the light was boring and the temperature was useless.

 

"I wish I could get a sample of his blood," Carson mourned as Rodney and John were busy readjusting something on the Relay.

 

"What good would that do?" Rodney asked, not looking up from the knut he was screwing into place. John concentrated very hard and lifted the heavy pliers into Rodney's waiting hand.

 

"I'd like to know if John had the ATA gene."

 

John looked up and shrugged. "I must have a grave somewhere," he said.

 

Carson slapped his own forehead.

 

***

 

Carson being Carson – the head geneticist on an internationally acclaimed yet top secret project – was given full cooperation by the local historical society and the cemetery. John thought he should be a little more uncomfortable with the thought that they were digging up his body and cutting off pieces, but he wasn't. His body was there, with him. He could touch and see and hear and smell, and sometimes taste, so that thing that his parents had buried in a box was none of his concern.

 

Still, John sat very still on his toboggan all afternoon on the day Carson went to exhume him. Johnny kept his eyes squeezed tightly shut, trying to see if he could feel or hear anything his body could.

 

He was still sitting there with his eyes closed when he heard the car rumble up the drive, so he supposed the answer was no.

 

Between Carson and Rodney they made three trips out to the big Sports Utility Vehicle that Carson drove and brought into the lab more tables and tubes and burners and other things John recognized from the chemistry set Father had given him for Christmas so many years ago.

 

Then came a red and white plastic box with a red cross on the outside and a sign that said, "Warning: Biohazard". Carson put it in a very small fridge under one of the desks.

 

"Is that where my body bits are?" John asked into the microphone, startling both men because they weren't wearing their glasses.

 

"Och, aye," Carson said, flustered by John's bluntness. "Hair and nails and skin scrapings and--"

 

"Can we skip the detailed inventory, please?" Rodney snapped, looking a little green around his face and tight around his mouth.

 

John laughed into the microphone, his voice bouncing around in a room filled with equipment that otherwise said he was dead.


	3. Chapter 3

Carson spent even longer in the lab every day than Rodney.

 

Unlike Rodney, who forgot to take into account that while John had certainly existed through the last two hundred years but was unfamiliar with any of its technological advances, Carson explained how the com-pyu-ter worked and everything he was doing on it.

 

"So that's my blood?"

 

"Aye. I'll add a bit of this ta it... see? Liquid again."

 

"It's gross," John said into the microphone with a huge grin.

 

"Aye, it is, isn't it?" Carson agreed, grinning himself.

 

Rodney huffed and dropped his pliers onto the metal table and snapped, "Can we keep the squishy conversation to a minimum while I am busy reconfiguring very very small and therefore finicky circuit boards? Thank you."

 

Carson rolled his eyes at Rodney and tapped the screen of the com-pyu-ter and said, "The program is just analyzing the results and ... there. That's your DNA there John and ... holy crap."

 

Rodney pushed his chair-on-wheels across the room, through John, and skidded to a stop beside Carson. "Holy crap what?"

 

"Holy crap, that's a hell of a lot of ATA gene, that's what, Rodney! Look it! There's a marker there, there, there, there. Even I don't have that many markers – god, Rodney, not even General O'Neil has that many!"

 

"That's... good?" John asked, not sure whether their pale faces and gobsmacked expressions was a sign of a problem or not.

 

"It's amazing!" Carson said, "You're not only highly evolved, John, you may be the closest thing to an actual Atlantian I've ever had the privilege ta study! If I could hug you, boy, I would!"

 

And that, of course, was the whole problem.

 

John, no matter what anyone did or said or discovered or invented, was still dead.

 

***

 

John retreated slowly and quietly out of the lab, letting Rodney and Carson celebrate in peace. John didn't feel like shouting and dancing this time.

 

Something behind his eyes burned and something in his throat was all tight and something in his stomach hurt. John thought it maybe might have been jealousy, or it might have been anger, but deep deep down he was scared that it was aching, horrible loneliness.

 

It didn't matter what Rodney said or Carson did, it didn't matter that they were John's friends and he thought maybe he loved them just as much as he had loved Father and nanny (maybe not as much as Mother, not yet, but way more than Meredith McKay), he could never be like them. He could never be with them.

 

One day they would stop making machines and doing experiments with John – one day they would get famous and win prizes and go away. One day, like his parents, they would leave John behind.

 

John's family was dead, they had to be, and yet they were not here. It was the first time John had really thought about it – he was a ghost, wasn't he? Why weren't they? Didn't they love John enough to stay behind? Why did they go to Heaven without John?

 

He slumped into his room and sat on his toboggan and put his hands over his face and thought very very hard about maybe... just... going back to sleep for a little while. Johnny vaguely remembered sleep. Sleep made things go away. Sleep made things stop hurting, didn't it?

 

Sleep made the loneliness vanish.

 

John looked up at his bed. He hadn't touched it since waking up to the sound of Rodney's furious screaming; he'd been too scared that he'd be sucked back into the drifting blackness. Now it seemed appealing, to doze and be nothing for... well, not forever, of course, but ...for a while, maybe?

 

Maybe just long enough to make John's skin stop aching for a hug it could never have.

 

***

 

John dreamed. He barely remembered what dreams were, so at first he thought he was still awake, but then he realized that he was outside of the house and so had to be dreaming.

 

John – Johnny – was standing at the top of the hill at the back of the house, with his brand new toboggan clutched in one mittened hand. His socks were soaked through and his nose was red from the biting wind and it was wonderful.

 

Johnny set the toboggan down, the expertly waxed blades digging little grooves in the fresh powder, and sat. He clutched the loop of twine that was the only means of steering, and set a foot into the hill to give himself a shove.

 

"Want a push, Johnny?" a voice asked behind him. Johnny tried to turn around to look at the speaker's face. He knew that voice, he wanted to see her. But he couldn't. Something was stopping him, and he hated it.

 

"Mother?" he asked softly.

 

"Want a little push, honey?" Mother asked again.

 

"No, Mother! I want to stay here with you," Johnny said desperately, digging the heels of his boots into the snow, wriggling his shoulders. Why couldn't he turn around?!

 

"Don’t be silly Johnny," she said, and Johnny felt cool hands against his back. "You love tobogganing."

 

"No!" Johnny said mulishly, "I don't, I don't! I don't love tobogganing at all!"

 

"Johnny, come on. Be grateful. Doctor McKay worked very hard on that toboggan for you – don't be rude. Go down the hill."

 

"I don't want to! Mother!"

 

But Mother was pushing Johnny and no matter how hard he dug in his heels he couldn't fight against gravity.

 

"Mother!"

 

"Good bye, Johnny!" Mother called as the front of the toboggan began to tip over the edge of the hill – the hill that had suddenly become a dark and dangerous cliff. "Please be polite to Rodney!"

 

"Mother, I want to stay with you!"

 

"Oh, Johnny, you can't." Mother said. "You aren't dead, yet. You haven't addressed your unfinished business at all. Do be a good boy and go back now, please!"

 

"Mother!"

 

The scream of the wind past Johnny's ears mingled with his own and drowned out anything else his mother might have said. Suddenly Johnny was plummeting downwards, the toboggan skidding slickly through the mist that shrouded side of the cliff. There were no trees, no stream at the bottom, just darkness and wind and down.

 

Johnny clutched the handles of the toboggan desperately and cried. Wind and salt water whipped at his cheeks, freezing the tears to his skin.

 

Then, as suddenly as the downward plummet had begun, the ground began to even out, and the toboggan slowed. The darkness eased and finally it was perfect golden daylight again. 

 

Johnny skidded to a stop, sliding sort of sideways off of the toboggan. He curled up in the snow and covered his eyes with his knit mittens and wept.

 

The only touch he'd felt in two centuries and he had been pushed away.

 

"John?" someone asked. His voice was distant and soft and a little bit sad. "John?" he said again. "John, can you...? God, I wish I could shake you or something. Are you sleeping? John? Because, because I'm pretty sure ghosts don't sleep. John? John? Are you... please wake up."

 

Johnny lifted his head. The voice was getting closer, but Johnny couldn't tell which direction it was coming from.

 

"Here," he said, but his throat hurt from screaming and the tears burned cold on his cheek and he was shivering all over, chilled all the way to the bone.

 

It felt like he was dying all over again.

 

"Carson! Did you hear...? John! John! Say something again. C'mon, please!"

 

"Here!" John croaked, sitting up. "I'm... I'm here!"

 

"Carson, did you hear?"

 

"Aye, keep calling him. John? John, come back to us now lad, there's a good man."

 

"Carson!" Johnny said, and then, "Rodney!" because that's who the other voice belonged to. Johnny stood up. "Rodney! Rodney, I'm here! I'm right here!" Johnny turned in a circle in the snow bank, waving his arms.

 

"John!" Rodney called, answering back.

 

There was a shadow in the distance, a smudge of a man, and it was running closer.

 

"Rodney!" Johnny said, and the tears began again, hot, melting the ice on his cheeks. He ran towards the smudge. "Carson! Rodney!"

 

The smudge did not resolve itself into any distinct shape, but Johnny kept running. He kept running until he was so close to it that he wouldn't be able to stop. He tried to, but he slid right into the smudge and out the other side. Johnny screamed.

 

There was a bang, and then Johnny – John – sat up and opened his eyes. He was still screaming.

 

"Thank God!" Rodney said. He was sitting on one side of the foot of John's bed; Carson was on the other.

 

John threw himself at Rodney and Rodney opened his arms. John fell right through Rodney and was so startled – was so sure that this time he would be able to touch – that he fell right through the bed and the floor beneath it too.

 

John stopped when he hit the floor in the library. He curled in on himself, scared because of the dream, because of the fall, and because it had not hurt to land. John wrapped his arms around his knees and ignored the pound of living feet racing down the stairs, and cried, and cried, and cried.

 

When Rodney and Carson got to the library they sat awkwardly on either side of John, hands hovering over the hitching back helplessly, frustratingly impotent; a cold and empty comfort to a terrified little boy.

 

***

 

Chinese food was ordered and beers opened, and John sat very, very still on his ledge beside the fireplace with his nose on his knee. He could smell the food, the beer, almost taste it in the back of his throat. He could not smell his trousers.

 

John was cold. The fire was turned up as high as it could go and he was still cold.

 

Rodney and Carson were talking about the SGC, sitting in sweat-dampened teeshirts for John's sake, telling a story about a Doctor named Daniel who kept dying and kept coming back and kept dying again. They talked in order to distract John, but it just made John ache more.

 

"What's 'unfinished business'?" John finally asked, cutting off Rodney's long rant about how the paperwork for coming back to life was thirty pages long and totally unnecessary, but he would rather have to fill it out than stay dead.

 

Rodney started hard enough that beer went up his nose. Carson just cleared his throat and looked suddenly sad and stared at his feet.

 

"What's 'unfinished business'?" John asked again, finally lifting his face from his legs. 

 

"Why?" Rodney asked. "Why does that matter?"

 

"Mother said I had unfinished business and that I had to come back."

 

Rodney gulped. All the colour slid off Carson's face.

 

"You saw your mother, lad?"

 

John jerked his head up and down once.

 

"Where were you?" Rodney asked. "You were asleep for a week John, we couldn't do anything to get you to wake up."

 

"Heaven, maybe?" John said uncertainly. "There was snow. And tobogganing." He felt his face twist and a lump in his throat burn. "I don't think I like tobogganing any more. What's 'unfinished business'?"

 

Rodney and Carson exchanged a worried, sad glance and said nothing.

 

"No fair!" John snapped. "You promised, no more secrets! You promised!"

 

"Aye, we did, lad," Carson admitted. He looked askance at Rodney, Rodney shook his head, lifted a trembling hand to scrub at his forehead, as if he was scared that something was written there. "Unfinished business is," Carson said with a sigh, "they say, what makes a ghost."

 

John blinked. "How?"

 

"If someone dies with something unfinished, undone," Rodney blurted, "they'll become a ghost. Like, if I die without getting my Nobel."

 

"So, I died before I finished something?" John asked tentatively.

 

"Perhaps," Carson said. "What do you think it--?"

 

"No!" Rodney snapped. "No, don't think about it!"

 

John blinked. "Why not?"

 

"If you think about it, then you might figure out what it was, and if you figure out what it was, you won't be a ghost any more. You'll, you'll go away, to H-heaven or... or...! Or wherever it is that Ascended or dead people go! Don't think about it."

 

John wrapped his hands tighter around his calves. "I won't go anyway, Rodney," John said. 

 

"But there is something?" Carson pressed.

 

"I guess," John admitted, scratching his elbow. Talk like this made him uncomfortable. If he talked about unfinished business and ghosts then eventually they'd end up talking about dying and John didn't like that topic. "But I don't want to. Besides, I can't remember."

 

"Good," Rodney said with such ferocity that even Carson looked taken aback. "I... I mean," Rodney swallowed and regained his composure. "I mean, how can I win my Nobel Prize if you go away?"

 

John smiled weakly, but something inside him, deep deep down inside, stopped hurting. For the first time in a while, he felt warm.

 

"Okay," Rodney said. "Okay. How about we watch the Leafs game?"

 

"Och, Rodney, no! Don't torture me!"

 

"On the television?" John asked excitedly, distracted by the appeal of the large flat screen and the small men in the box beating each other up.

 

***

 

Rodney had finished work on the prototype of the Relay and began constructing a better, more portable model. Once the working model was complete, he said he was going to go away for a little while to Colorado to bring the blueprints and a sample of the Atlantian Glass to a doctor named Lee.

 

Carson went back to his blood and body bits and scanning machines and John hovered behind their shoulders, soaking in everything Carson and Rodney would tell him about maths and science and the world outside of the house.

 

When John asked Carson what he was doing all his experimenting for, Carson winked and smiled and called it a surprise. John hated secrets, but surprises were secrets that eventually people told, so John supposed that was okay.

 

Several days later, John came in from the library, where he and Rodney were using the huge reference desk to spread out and double check the Relay blueprints (Rodney had fallen asleep on his laptop because Carson had replaced all the coffee with decaf, but that was a secret just for Carson and John), to find the house filled with men in military uniforms. They were hauling glass and metal things into the lab, piling them around a big hollow tube that had replaced Rodney's whiteboard in the corner.

 

John brushed past Carson to give him a chill and let him know John was there, then waited until the room was empty before going over to the prototype Relay that was ever ready on one of the desks.

 

"What's this for?" John asked.

 

"Your surprise," Carson said.

 

Rodney came into the room, still sleep rumpled and keyboard-creased, glasses hanging off one ear, took one look at the tube in the corner and yelped. "That's a--!"

 

"Aye, Rodney, it is."

 

"How did you get permission to take Asguard technology off the base?" Rodney asked with barely concealed jealousy.

 

"My experiment parameters require that I be in this house in particular." Carson gave Rodney a cat-and-canary grin. "And I'm the head of the genetics research department."

 

Rodney frowned at Carson, then gestured for John to follow him out of the room. "C'mon, squirt," Rodney said. "Carson's going to keep this secret from both of us, and I need more coffee if I'm going to deal with mister-obnoxious-smarty-pants all day."

 

Carson winked and John, and John tried to wink back. He wasn't very good at winking, so he closed both eyes in a mischievous blink instead.

 

***

 

Another week passed. Carson kept his surprise a secret and Rodney started packing to go to Colorado. John felt uneasy with the thought of Rodney going away. He was afraid that maybe Rodney was his unfinished business, the reason that he was hanging around the house. Johnny hadn't woken up until Rodney had arrived. If Rodney left, John might go back to sleep. Worse that than, this time he might never wake up.

 

So John hovered in the doorway of Rodney's room and watched him cram things into his suitcase and chewed on his bottom lip.

 

Rodney just finished doing up the zipper of his bag when he noticed John standing in the door. "John. Hey. How long have you been standing there?"

 

John shrugged.

 

"What's up?" Rodney sat on the side of the bed. 

This was one of those times when John wished he could touch. Instead he shrugged again, then looked at the suitcase. Rodney was going away.

 

Rodney clicked his fingers, a double snap pop that John had come to associate with McKay-style revelations. "I'm leaving."

 

John nodded.

 

"I'm coming back though."

 

John nodded again and couldn't keep the misery out of the slump of his shoulders.

 

"Whoa, hey, no waterworks," Rodney cautioned, but his tone was gentle. "I won't be gone long. I just need to show that moron Lee how to read the blueprints – they're very complex – and maybe build a few prototypes and do some tests and... I won't be gone longer than, than a week, okay? Just a week."

 

John rubbed his arm and nodded and looked at his feet. He wiggled his bare toes.

 

"I'll be back before you know it," Rodney said.

 

***

 

John did not fall back asleep with Rodney gone, but he felt listless and tired all the time. He just sat beside the fireplace in the library and tried not to shiver. Carson carried the Relay prototype into the library and put it beside the mantle and spent hours and hours every day sitting on the settee with cups of tea, reading John stories out of the books on the shelves around them.

 

Carson didn't do the voice of Grimm's wolves right, not the way that nanny used to do it.

 

When Carson fell asleep, head lolling against the arm rest, John concentrated really hard and pulled the blanket that was flung over the back of the settee over the man. Carson threw it off in the middle of the night, sweat beading on his forehead. 

 

John had the fire turned up all the way, and it was the zenith of summer, and still John couldn't seem to make the cold in his gut go away.

 

The week passed torturously slowly, and finally, on Thursday afternoon, John could not resist the lure of sleep any longer. Carson said something about ghostly hypothermia and unfinished business, and John just curled up beside the fire and closed his eyes.

 

***

 

A commanding shout, "John! Wake up!", snapped John back into wakefulness and out of the drifting darkness.

 

"Rodney?" he asked, scrubbing at an eye. The Relay was still sitting beside him.

 

Carson's relieved face swam into view. "Och! John, lad, I thought we'd lost ya!"

 

"H'long 'v I been asleep?" John asked around a yawn.

 

"Two days," Carson said. "An' you didn't being ta stir until Rodney came inta the room."

 

"Hm," Rodney said, dropping his suitcase to the floor beside the settee and tapping his chin. "The only times you've woken up is when I've been nearby." Snap double pop. "I'm your unfinished business!" Rodney crowed.

 

"How can you be?" John asked, brain still foggy and fuddled with receding dark and the evaporating threads of gossamer dreams. "You weren't born when I died."

 

Rodney paused mid-breath and shrugged. "How should I know? Now, c'mon, Carson's surprise is ready."

 

That woke John up all the way. He sprang to his feet and sprinted into the lab, not bothering to go around the settee or the doors or the walls.

 

By the time Rodney and Carson got to the lab, John was just looking down into the glass tube

 

His own face stared back. 

 

He yelled and took a step back so fast he stopped halfway through a table. "It's me!" John said. The microphone on the new Relay model, which Rodney had left in the middle of the room, was strong enough to pick up his voice.

 

"Ta be more precise," Carson corrected, "it's a clone. That's like a replica. I took the old pieces of you and I sort of mixed them together and grew a new you."

 

"A new me?" John repeated, taking a wary step back towards the coffin. His hands and knees felt like Rodney's blue Jell-O. "Are you going to replace me?"

 

"Och, no John," Carson clucked. "This is an Asguard clone. There's no... well, there's no soul inside it." Carson tapped the side of his head. "It's just an empty shell, yes? Like a suit that you need ta put on. If you go inside it, then it can be your new body."

 

John swallowed hard. "I can be alive again?"

"Aye - you'll be alive and ten years old again."

"Will I grow up?"

"Yes, lad."

 

"Hold on, wait!" Rodney said, "How will I get my Nobel for inventing the first ghost communication device if I have no ghost?"

 

"Rodney!" Carson scolded. "It's not like you could take John ta Stockholm anyway. An' all the research has been classified by the SGC."

 

"Oh," Rodney said, face falling. He scrubbed a hand through travel-mussed hair. "I hadn't thought of that." He looked back up at John. "Well, what are you waiting for, kid? Climb in. Get yourself a body. Be alive and all that."

 

"Alive," John repeated again, because it was just too strange.

 

"Hurry up, or I'll eat all the leftover pizza myself," Rodney scolded.

 

"Pizza!" John cried, and dove at the tube.

 

He clambered over the side and lay down right on top of the body. It felt like laying on the same stuff that kept him trapped in the house.

 

"It's not working!" he pouted.

 

Carson moved over to the computer and tapped a few keys and frowned. "This is odd – not at all like Hermiod said the readings would be. John should just... sink in."

 

"Well, obviously something is wrong," Rodney said, shoving Carson aside to check the wiring, the calculations, the software.

 

John squirmed. "Maybe it's something I have to do?"

 

"Do?" Rodney asked without looking up, fingers still whizzing over the keys. "Like what?"

 

"My unfinished business, maybe?" John said in a very small voice.

 

Rodney and Carson both froze.

 

"I..." John said softly, slowly. He hesitated, the screwed up his courage and said, "I think I remember what it is."

 

"No," Rodney said, spinning in his chair to face John. "What if you're wrong? What if you just... go away?"

 

John shrugged. "Rodney, come here? Please?" John said, because even though he was scared, a little bit, John still remembered his manners.

 

Rodney pulled himself to his feet, shaking. His lips had turned into a thin white slice. He stumbled over to the side of the tube.

 

"Closer," John said.

 

Rodney leaned in.

 

John craned his neck up and whispered into Rodney's ear:

 

"Thank you, Doctor McKay, for the really cool toboggan."

 

Then he felt himself sinking.

 

The last thing John heard was Rodney frantically screaming his name.

 

***

 

What felt like a million years later, but was probably only a few seconds, John opened his eyes. Really opened his eyes. They felt heavy and wet.

 

"Hi," he croaked, the first words spoken with his new mouth. "Cool."

 

"Yeah," Rodney said from where he had slumped to the hardwood floors with relief. "Cool."

 

John sat up, the world swirling just a little bit, and leaned down, and wrapped his arms around Rodney's shoulders. Rodney reached up and lay one wide dry hand against the back of John's neck, and finally, finally, John got that hug.


End file.
